Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ogicse!mintaka!bloom-beacon!daemon
From: scs@adam.mit.edu (Steve Summit)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: long identifiers
Keywords: identifiers
Message-ID: <1990Oct25.175307.4306@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 25 Oct 90 17:53:07 GMT
References: <15953@csli.Stanford.EDU> <487@taumet.com> <15959@csli.Stanford.EDU> <272477A0.6845@tct.uucp> <1925@tuvie>
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Reply-To: scs@adam.mit.edu (Steve Summit)
Organization: Thermal Technologies, Inc.
Lines: 19

In article <1925@tuvie> hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at (Peter Holzer) writes:
>IMHO you should write your program readable, and long identifiers add a lot
>to readability. Restricting identifier names to 6 characters is a BUG...

You can have your cake and eat it too.  You don't have to limit
external identifiers to six characters, you just have to keep
them unique in the first six characters.  You can have a routine
called poweron() as long as you don't also have one called
poweroff().

From time to time I come across "maximally portable" subroutine
libraries which have slavishly kept all of their 2,574 external
identifiers to exactly six characters, and they might as well
have been run through a shrouding program.  (Or were they C ports
of some old Fortran libraries, and did some old version of
Fortran limit identifiers to no more than six characters?)

                                            Steve Summit
                                            scs@adam.mit.edu